Kangning Yang

Kangning Yang, Ling Ouyang, Huiming Sun et al.

Reflection removal technology plays a crucial role in photography and computer vision applications. However, existing techniques are hindered by the lack of high-quality in-the-wild datasets. In this paper, we propose a novel paradigm for collecting reflection datasets from a fresh perspective. Our approach is convenient, cost-effective, and scalable, while ensuring that the collected data pairs are of high quality, perfectly aligned, and represent natural and diverse scenarios. Following this paradigm, we collect a Real-world, Diverse, and Pixel-aligned dataset (named OpenRR-1k dataset), which contains 1,000 high-quality transmission-reflection image pairs collected in the wild. Through the analysis of several reflection removal methods and benchmark evaluation experiments on our dataset, we demonstrate its effectiveness in improving robustness in challenging real-world environments. Our dataset is available at https://github.com/caijie0620/OpenRR-1k.

Jie Cai, Kangning Yang, Ling Ouyang et al.

Removing reflections is a crucial task in computer vision, with significant applications in photography and image enhancement. Nevertheless, existing methods are constrained by the absence of large-scale, high-quality, and diverse datasets. In this paper, we present a novel benchmark for Single Image Reflection Removal (SIRR). We have developed a large-scale dataset containing 5,300 high-quality, pixel-aligned image pairs, each consisting of a reflection image and its corresponding clean version. Specifically, the dataset is divided into two parts: 5,000 images are used for training, and 300 images are used for validation. Additionally, we have included 100 real-world testing images without ground truth (GT) to further evaluate the practical performance of reflection removal methods. All image pairs are precisely aligned at the pixel level to guarantee accurate supervision. The dataset encompasses a broad spectrum of real-world scenarios, featuring various lighting conditions, object types, and reflection patterns, and is segmented into training, validation, and test sets to facilitate thorough evaluation. To validate the usefulness of our dataset, we train a U-Net-based model and evaluate it using five widely-used metrics, including PSNR, SSIM, LPIPS, DISTS, and NIQE. We will release both the dataset and the code on https://github.com/caijie0620/OpenRR-5k to facilitate future research in this field.

Kangning Yang, Huiming Sun, Jie Cai et al.

The phenomenon of reflection is quite common in digital images, posing significant challenges for various applications such as computer vision, photography, and image processing. Traditional methods for reflection removal often struggle to achieve clean results while maintaining high fidelity and robustness, particularly in real-world scenarios. Over the past few decades, numerous deep learning-based approaches for reflection removal have emerged, yielding impressive results. In this survey, we conduct a comprehensive review of the current literature by focusing on key venues such as ICCV, ECCV, CVPR, NeurIPS, etc., as these conferences and journals have been central to advances in the field. Our review follows a structured paper selection process, and we critically assess both single-stage and two-stage deep learning methods for reflection removal. The contribution of this survey is three-fold: first, we provide a comprehensive summary of the most recent work on single-image reflection removal; second, we outline task hypotheses, current deep learning techniques, publicly available datasets, and relevant evaluation metrics; and third, we identify key challenges and opportunities in deep learning-based reflection removal, highlighting the potential of this rapidly evolving research area.

Jie Cai, Kangning Yang, Jiaming Ding et al.

Image degradation is a prevalent issue in various real-world applications, affecting visual quality and downstream processing tasks. In this study, we propose a novel framework that employs a Vision-Language Model (VLM) to automatically classify degraded images into predefined categories. The VLM categorizes an input image into one of four degradation types: (A) super-resolution degradation (including noise, blur, and JPEG compression), (B) reflection artifacts, (C) motion blur, or (D) no visible degradation (high-quality image). Once classified, images assigned to categories A, B, or C undergo targeted restoration using dedicated models tailored for each specific degradation type. The final output is a restored image with improved visual quality. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in accurately classifying image degradations and enhancing image quality through specialized restoration models. Our method presents a scalable and automated solution for real-world image enhancement tasks, leveraging the capabilities of VLMs in conjunction with state-of-the-art restoration techniques.

Huiming Sun, Yikang Li, Kangning Yang et al.

Inpainting for real-world human and pedestrian removal in high-resolution video clips presents significant challenges, particularly in achieving high-quality outcomes, ensuring temporal consistency, and managing complex object interactions that involve humans, their belongings, and their shadows. In this paper, we introduce VIP (Video Inpainting Pipeline), a novel promptless video inpainting framework for real-world human removal applications. VIP enhances a state-of-the-art text-to-video model with a motion module and employs a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) for progressive denoising in the latent space. Additionally, we implement an efficient human-and-belongings segmentation for precise mask generation. Sufficient experimental results demonstrate that VIP achieves superior temporal consistency and visual fidelity across diverse real-world scenarios, surpassing state-of-the-art methods on challenging datasets. Our key contributions include the development of the VIP pipeline, a reference frame integration technique, and the Dual-Fusion Latent Segment Refinement method, all of which address the complexities of inpainting in long, high-resolution video sequences.

Yue Gu, Kangning Yang, Shiyu Fu et al.

Multimodal affective computing, learning to recognize and interpret human affects and subjective information from multiple data sources, is still challenging because: (i) it is hard to extract informative features to represent human affects from heterogeneous inputs; (ii) current fusion strategies only fuse different modalities at abstract level, ignoring time-dependent interactions between modalities. Addressing such issues, we introduce a hierarchical multimodal architecture with attention and word-level fusion to classify utter-ance-level sentiment and emotion from text and audio data. Our introduced model outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches on published datasets and we demonstrated that our model is able to visualize and interpret the synchronized attention over modalities.